Philosophy of Bad LanguageSlurs, Swear Words, and Silencing

Course Description:Despite what grown ups told us as children, words can hurt. Slurs, insults, and swears can be highly offensive and derogatory. What explains the capacity of these pejorative expressions to injure and offend? Is it because of what they literally mean? Or is it because of who uses them and how they are used? Do racists use racial slurs because they are derogatory, or are they derogatory because racists use them? Why is the use of a slur often derogatory even when the speaker has no negative attitude toward its target? How is it that slurs and insults have the power to ‘silence’ or undermine the communicative power of their targets? Can any pejorative expression be re-appropriated? This course aims to introduce students to the philosophy of language by engaging with the recent attempts to answer these questions.

After a brief ``crash course'' in the rudiments of philosophy of language, we will read and discuss recent articles by linguists and philosophers of language that attempt to identify and explain the behavior of pejoratives. This behavior includes the ability for such expressions to denigrate their targets both with and without a concomitant expression of derogatory attitudes, their ability to affect different degrees of offense, the sense of complicity that bystanders experience when overhearing their utterance, the capacity for their derogatory force to project out of various embedding contexts, and the possibility for such expressions to be neutralized or even re-appropriated. The articles we will read offer competing explanations of this behavior.

Our goal in the course will be to understand and evaluate these theories with an eye toward developing recommendations on how individuals and institutions ought to respond to the use of pejorative language in various contexts. To this end, we will examine particular instances of pejorative language-use drawn from television, film, journalism, literature, blogs, and social media. In each case, we will identify the behaviors and effects exhibited by the utterance and attempt to explain them by deploying the theories we've studied. In addition to understanding the peculiar linguistic phenomena associated with pejoratives, students will also examine how this understanding informs the ways in which we can and should respond, both collectively and individually, to the use of pejoratives.

Comments: At a time when campaigns for social justice and debates about the limits of free speech dominate college campuses in the US, this course offers students an opportunity to confront the deep philosophical issues regarding how and to what extent words can cause harm. Just as importantly, the course challenges students to grapple with uncomfortable, even disturbing phenomena. In order to evaluate theories of pejorative language, we must have access to certain linguistic intuitions regarding offense and derogation. The material we will examine thus has the potential to arouse precisely those reactions that have elicited calls for trigger warnings from students, faculty and administrators. Since one of the central questions of this course concerns the policies we ought to adopt toward the use of pejorative language, the issue of whether to implement trigger warnings in the course is itself a topic for discussion.

As a straight, white male from a middle-class American family, I often joke with my students that teaching this course at Agnes Scott, a women's college with a majority non-white-identifying student body, is akin to taking a field trip to a bee farm in which only I have a protective suit. Among other things, my privilege insulates me from much of the potential harm caused by pejoratives. It follows that I should not be the one deciding which vocabularies are to serve as our go-to examples. Instead, that decision lies with the students.

At our very first meeting, students set about designing a preliminary policy governing the utterance of pejorative expressions. This policy addresses questions such as: Which slurs (if any) can be spoken in class? Which can be written? Who can speak/write them? How should students communicate their objections to the presentation of certain slurs? What consequences (if any) should there be for violation of the policy? At each subsequent meeting, students revisit this policy in order to offer suggestions on whether and how to revise it and to raise concerns about its implementation. In our final meeting, students are asked to reflect upon this policy, its success and limitations, and its potential application to other institutional settings. In this course, all participants are responsible for instituting and administering a safe space.

This activity has several pedagogical benefits. It forces students to contend with philosophical issues in the context of a concrete, practical problem. It calls upon students to consider their own privilege, bias, and oppression. It demands that they engage with one another empathetically as they negotiate the complex web of power, prejudice, and emotional response. Most of all, it puts students in command of their own learning.